Saturday, March 23, 2013

Another novel about the war in Iraq might not be the tasty
treat you've been craving but Ben Fountain’s absurd tale, the winner of the
National Book Critics Circle Award and a National Book Award finalist, is an absolute
must. The Pulitzer Prize Committee
improbably chose not to award a fiction prize in 2012. This April they’ll be hard pressed to deny a
winner with titles like Louise Erdrich’s The
Round House, Kevin Powers’ The Yellow
Birds and, yes, Ben Fountain’s Billy
Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk all deserving of the prize.

In the novel, every television in the U.S showed the Iraq "battle of Al-Ansakar Canal” via tape from an embedded Fox News crew and now the eight survivors of
Bravo Squad are America’s most popular heroes. Thus the Bush administration has sent
them on a two-week victory tour before they return to battle. The book is set
on a rainy Thanksgiving Day at the end of that tour as the Bravos are
attending a Dallas Cowboys game and will appear at halftime along with Beyoncé
and Destiny’s Child. Billy Lynn, Specialist William Lynn, is a
nineteen-year-old Texas kid who enlisted to avoid a prison sentence for
destroying his sister’s fiancé’s car after the fiancé dumped her while she was
recovering from a disfiguring accident.
Billy was an empty vessel eager to learn about the world and Shroom, his
sergeant, educated him before dying in Billy’s arms. One of the most remarkable qualities of this
novel is Fountain’s ability to make Shroom such an engaging figure though we
only know him through Billy’s memories. Billy’s certain he’ll never go back to school
even though he yearns to learn about the world but knows that school isn’t
where he’ll find that knowledge. “If there is real knowledge to be had in the
Texas public schools he never found it, and only lately has he started to feel
the loss, the huge criminal act of his state-sanctioned ignorance as he struggles
to understand the wider world. How it
works, who gains, who loses, who decides.
It is not a casual thing, this knowledge. In a way it might be everything. A young man
needs to know where he stands in the world, not just as a matter of basic human
dignity but as determinants in the ways and means of survival and what you
might hope to gain by application of honest effort.”

In one Thanksgiving Day, Billy will learn about himself and
as he learns, we’ll see through his family, the Texas elite, the people hoping
to make money selling his story, a cheerleader, and his fellow Bravo brothers –
that war is as much about the people “untouched” at home as it is about those
who fight. Billy Lynn’s portraits of
the people he encounters at the game explode with universal truth that’s
impossible to ignore. When Billy meets tanned, glamorous multi-millionaires who
are nothing like anyone he’s ever encountered he thinks: “they are different,
these Americans. They are the ballers. They
dress well, they practice the most advanced hygienes, they are conversant in
the world of complex investments and fairly hum with the pleasures of good
living – gourmet meals, fine wines, skill at games and sports, a working
knowledge of the capitals of Europe. If they aren’t quite as flawlessly
handsome as models or movie actors, they certainly possess the vitality and
style, of say, the people in a Viagra advertisement. Special time with Bravo is
just one of the multitude of pleasures available to them, and thinking about it
makes Billy somewhat bitter. It’s not
that he’s jealous so much as profoundly terrified. Dread of returning to Iraq equals the direst
poverty, and that’s how he feels right now,
poor, like a shabby, homeless kid suddenly thrust into the company of millionaires. Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul,
to be free of it is something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a
hundred million dollars. That is what he
truly envies these people, the luxury of terror as a talking point, and at this
moment he feels so sorry for himself that he could break right down and
cry. I’m a good soldier, he tells
himself, aren’t I a good soldier? So
what does it mean when a good soldier feels this bad?”

Billy Lynn is a good soldier but even he gets tired of it
all. “He gets tired of living with the
daily beat-down of it, not just the normal animal fear of pain and death but
the uniquely human fear of fear itself like a CD stuck on skip-repeat, an
ever-narrowing self-referential loop that may well be a form of madness. . . So
these are Billy’s thoughts while he makes small talk about the war. He tries to keep it low-key, but people steer
the conversation toward drama and passion. They just assume if you’re a Bravo
you’re here to talk about the war, because, well, if Barry Bonds were here they’d
talk about baseball. . . Here at home the war is a problem to be solved with
correct thinking and proper resource allocation. . .”

Fountain imbues Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk with a
wicked sense of humor and a series of improbable events that sometimes make you
laugh out loud. Such gallows humor
allows the reader to continue to take in Billy’s tale and remain sane. You owe it to yourself and those who serve in
your name to read this book. Don’t just
skim it; devour it, embody it, make it a part of you. It deserves that attention.

Summing it Up: Read Billy
Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk because it will be one of the most important
books of this decade. Read it because
you can and because you’ll savor Fountain’s skill while wondering how you might
react if one day you met someone like Billy. Read it because it’s so evocative
that you’ll find yourself in the bowels of Cowboy Stadium with a hangover
wondering who you are. Get on your knees
and beg your book club to choose it so you can process it together.

Friday, March 22, 2013

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has died. His 1958 novel Things Fall Apart introduced a changing Africa to the world,
The novel has sold more than ten million copies in fifty different
languages. Nelson Mandela called Achebe, "the writer in whose company the prison walls came down."

Using W. B. Yeats words “Things fall apart,
the center cannot hold, Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” Achebe showed
the falling apart of Africa while revealing the universality of humans in all
times and places.

Things Fall Apart is the story of Igbo warrior Okonkwo and life in an Igbo village in the late 19th century when the white men arrived. While the novel is completely African, it speaks to all people especially in light of the last hundred years.

If you haven’t read Things
Fall Apart, honor Mr. Achebe’s memory and read it today. Choose it for your book club for a spirited
discussion. It's impossible to be culturally literate without reading this book.

Friday, March 8, 2013

Reading Salt, Sugar,
Fat is like devouring a murder mystery – only you’re the intended
victim. Yes, a book packed with
chemistry and research can be a page-turner.
This book is as addictive as the foods it studies so the paradox is that
readers are essentially learning about their own demise. That may not make it seem an appetizing read
but the book is also similar to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series you or
your children may have read. Based on
the information the book provides, you can choose which path to follow – that
of allowing the food giants to hook you or of knowing their tricks and how to avoid
them thus choosing a healthier life. This is not a diet book, a fad of the month
self-help tome, nor is it an easy fix.
It is instead the careful reporting of what’s inside the foods we eat.

Some facts presented in the book will probably surprise you:

“On average, we
consume 71 pounds of caloric sweeteners each year. That’s 22 teaspoons of
sugar, per person, per day.” Not me, I said to my sanctimonious self. I rarely eat cookies, cake, pie or dessert. Ha, little did I know of the places that the
big food conglomerates hide sugar. Campbell’s
Prego spaghetti sauce is probably found on the shelves of many American homes. “The Prego sauces – whether cheesy, chunky,
or light – have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes,
is sugar. A mere half cup of Prego Traditional, for instance, has more than two
teaspoons of sugar, as much as three Oreo cookies, a tube of Go-Gurt, or some
of the Pepperidge Farm Apple Turnovers that Campbell also makes. It also delivers one-third of the salt
recommended for a majority of American adults for an entire day. Some of the
meat versions of Prego have even higher amounts of sugar and salt, along with
nearly half a day’s recommended limit for saturated fat.”

I also learned that I can’t rest after ascertaining that a product
is low in fat or salt or whichever of the big three I’m avoiding at the
time. When the public starts clamoring
for less fat, the food giants lower it but to keep us buying, they up the salt
and/or sugar so the product will still taste good. Those labels on our
favorites can change without us ever suspecting because the products taste the same. The food giants use terms that sound good to
make us buy. The “2 percent” labeling (in milk) may lead you to believe that 98 percent of the fat is removed, but in
truth the fat content of whole milk is only a tad higher, at 3 percent.
Consumer groups who urge people to drink 1 percent or nonfat milk have fought
unsuccessfully over the years to have the 2 percent claim barred as deceptive.”

Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, is the
father of two boys ages ten and thirteen so he knows that it isn’t easy to
avoid processed foods. One of the beauties
of this book is that he doesn’t preach and he never makes the reader feel
guilty for consuming salt, sugar, or fat. Instead, Moss provides powerful information
that will allow the busiest of us to make decisions about what we put in our
bodies.

He shows us that the food industry won’t change because
salt, sugar, and fat are cheap, interchangeable, and they make food taste
good. “They are huge, powerful forces of nature in unnatural food... They may
have salt, sugar, and fat on their side, but we, ultimately, have the power to
make choices. After all, we decide what
to buy. We decide how much to eat. Kirkus
Reviews calls this book “A
shocking, galvanizing manifesto against the corporations manipulating nutrition
to fatten their bottom line—one of the most important books of the year.” I thoroughly agree and urge everyone to read
it and to choose it for your next book club discussion.

Summing it Up: Read this book to save yourself and those you
love from being manipulated by the food giants.
Read it to learn how to avoid the progressively addictive attraction of
the foods at eye level in our grocery stores.
Read it because it’s an addictive treat that reads more like a bag of
potato chips than a bunch of raw kale.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

“Benediction – the
utterance of a blessing, an invocation of blessedness” is the epigraph that
opens Kent Haruf’s new novel. When I read the last
page of this gem, I felt the "invocation of blessedness" in getting to share in the life of the quiet
community Haruf has created in Holt, Colorado, also the setting of his acclaimed
novel Plainsong. Like Plainsong,
Benediction is replete with everyday characters capable of stealing your
heart.

The main character, Dad Lewis, gets the news that he has
terminal cancer in the book’s opening lines: “When the test came back the nurse called
them into the examination room and when the doctor entered the room he just
looked at them and asked them to sit down. They could tell by the look on his
face where matters stood.”

When Dad and his wife,
Mary, return from the doctor, she takes him a tray of food and a bottle of
beer.

“He looked at the beer bottle and held it
in front of him and took a small drink.I might get me some kind of better grade of beer
before I go. A guy I was talking to said something about Belgian beer. Maybe
I’ll try some of that. If I can get it around here.He sat and drank the beer and held his wife’s
hand sitting out on the front porch. So the truth was he was dying. That’s what
they were saying. He would be dead before the end of summer. By the beginning
of September the dirt would be piled over what was left of him out at the
cemetery three miles east of town.”

Everyone in Holt
calls Dad Lewis “Dad” even the employees at the hardware store he’s owned for
decades. It’s an apt moniker as hardware
store owners remain among the few who listen to our problems and offer us
simple solutions or force us to face the reality that we might just need a
bigger fix – just like our own “Dads” or the “Dads” we wish we had. Haruf’s
writing provides the gift of making us feel that a man like Dad is someone we'd like in our own lives - well, most of the time.

Food is an
essential element in Benediction. In towns
like Holt, people still bring food when someone is ill, still sit down together
for meals, still have potlucks at church, and still tell people they love them by
bringing them a covered dish. When Mary
ends up hospitalized with exhaustion, neighbor, Berta May, arrives at Dad’s
door with a plate of food and questions: “Are you sick or something? Are you
going to die?” That’s how it is in Holt,
Colorado; people get to the point and they take care of one another.

After Mary’s
hospitalization, daughter Lorraine comes home to help. She’s still not over the death of her own
daughter at the age of sixteen in a long ago accident. Her marriage isn’t strong and she’s had no
recent contact with her brother, Frank, who’s long been estranged from their
father. Dad’s health fails and he begins
to sit and watch the world from his window while contemplating the mistakes
he’s made and savoring the love of the people around him. That Haruf has been a hospice
volunteer is evident in the care with which he depicts the process of
dying, death, and the details of lovingly caring for the terminally ill.

Neighbor Berta
May has taken in her eight-year-old granddaughter, Alice, after her mother’s
death from cancer. Lorraine is drawn to the child but young Alice sees parallels
in Dad’s condition that bring back painful memories so she tries to avoid the
Lewis family. The Johnson women, an old widow and longtime church friend and
her daughter, begin helping out and they take Alice on picnics, out for
ice cream, and buy her a bicycle that allows her freedom and burgeoning happiness.

The community
church’s new pastor who’s been sent to Holt as a last-ditch maneuver for his
“inappropriate” sermons offers companionship but then commits the cardinal sin
of preaching on the Sermon on the Mount and expecting his congregation to
believe it. “People don’t want to be disturbed.
They want assurance. They don’t
want to come to church on Sunday morning to think about new ideas or even the
old important ones.” They certainly
don’t want to be told to turn the other cheek and love their enemies. They call Pastor Lyle a terrorist and can’t
understand why he doesn’t hate Muslims as they do. Only the Johnson women and a rule-bound usher
stand by the pastor and the reader sees that Holt, like places everywhere,
isn’t utopia. Holt is a metaphor for the
universality of cities, small towns and suburbs where everyone must deal with
living, dying, and accepting the hand we’ve been dealt.

It’s easy to see
that Haruf grew up as a preacher’s kid in a small town like Holt where people
love and take care of each other but are often bound by the chains of small
ideas, rules, and fear. The minor
characters sins loom over the landscape and provide the reader with a deeper
understanding of Dad and this community he so loves. My favorite play, Our Town, always reminds me that nothing matters more than this
day. Benediction
offers the same reminder wrapped in a package that allows us to see it
clearly.

Summing it Up: Kent Haruf is the master of the quotidian:
celebrating and sharing the lives of ordinary people doing ordinary
things. Read this novel to share in the
rhythm of the land and the people and to rejoice that there are still writers
who carry us with them into a world both completely familiar yet new enough to
stun us into contemplating our own lives.
Haruf’s writing is grace personified.

About Me - Trina Hayes

Connecting people with books they'll love is what I do. I lead three book clubs and participate in another. I speak about books to library, university, social and civic groups and I'd love to speak to your gathering. My annual book list of the more than 100 books I read and review every year comes out every November. Find past lists on the pages listed below. Because I'm always hungry for good books, I categorize the books on the lists and on my posts by food groups as explained in the review categories listed below.

Contact me with questions or about hiring me to speak at trinabookhungry@gmail.com or by posting a comment on one of my reviews.